It's been a slow start at Fe y Alegría for the past few weeks. At the end of our first week we got the call we'd been waiting for to go to Ecuador and claim our visas, which will allow us to stay past the tourist deadline of three months, and so we skipped off north on an overnight bus and were gone for a total of five days. The trip deserves its own entry, so all I'll say here is that we now have religious visas, making our "temporary nun" status official in the eyes of those who check our passports.
When I was considering coming here and heard "school in a shanty town in Peru," I was thinking of a few rooms, a couple teachers, and a chalkboard; thankfully Fe y Alegría is much more developed than that, but in a way it makes it more difficult that the school is fully functional without any help from us at all. In a place where everybody more or less has their schedule and their established ways of doing things, we have to figure out the most beneficial way to spend our time and then create a place for ourselves based on that. Catherine spent the first week as an aide in the kindergarten through second grade and sixth grade classrooms to get to know her future students. Then, starting last Friday, she began to teach them English. She says the sixth grade is going well, but the kindergarteners are basically a zoo, which is frustrating for someone trained as a secondary school teacher. The other big issue is materials: there aren't any, at least not being handed to her. Whatever she wants, worksheets, posters, textbooks, she has to either create or go ask somebody to help get it for her. The same goes for me--it's just that I haven't felt the lack of materials because I haven't really started creating lessons of my own yet.
During the first week I spent most of my time in the 8th through 11th grade English classrooms. The English teacher, Soledad, is a very nice, very graceful woman who speaks English well but knows she has an accent, so she asks me to help the kids pronounce the words they study. I've even noticed that she has corrected a few things about her own pronunciation based on what I've been teaching the kids, which is really professional of her. Not to mention the fact that she has basically accepted me into her class as an auxiliary teacher and been totally flexible about when I'm there and when I'm not. Flexibility, I'm learning, is one thing that this school and the teachers have in spades. Structure... not quite so much.
The first few weeks of English have been review for the students: introducing themselves, spelling (I made the more energetic groups sing the alphabet song), and vocabulary like fruits, vegetables, colors, and parts of the body. They only have two 45-minute periods of English per week. There are some hilarious things that get said in a language classroom, from the students who are "fixteen" years old to the literal translation of the school's motto on the wall, which reads, "Honesty, Laboriousness, Veracity," to the fact that not one group of students remembered on the first day that the letter Y is Y and not U. One class after another would get to "I'm sorry" on the chart of Magic Words and spell, S! O! R! R! U! (Monty Python fans--"Y, sir!"--"Y!" U is right out.) But helping with pronunciation is only so exciting, and I was getting bored, until just yesterday I started taking small groups of the more advanced students to the library for a little extra enhancement of what they're reviewing in class. It's going great so far. For tercero (9th grade), we took the colors they'd reviewed and started saying sentences like "I have a white shirt." For cuarto (10th grade), we expanded their review list of fruits and vegetables to include other foods and started to say, "I like to eat (whatever) for breakfast." It feels great to take the kids who are ready to go on and give them more to do. If nothing else, I feel that is a real gift I can make to the school this year. Of course, they are going to demand actual lesson planning, but I have a trained teacher as my Siamese twin for the year, and she's already given me a crash course in that.
So English is moving along for both of us. Our other projects are still in the works. For the after-school English club, we have to coordinate with the vice-principal for secundaria about the timing, plus decide whether we want one group or more, on what level, etc. I need to get Catherine and Soledad in the same place at the same time to discuss that... hopefully today... The hard thing is organizing anything, because it's all so unofficial that I'm never sure when something is actually happening or not. For my choir, the one that exists in my head at least, all I've managed to accomplish so far is to email my middle school choir director for advice on working with kids, and find out that all I'm getting is one rehearsal per week (on Fridays from 4:30 to 6! Gross!) with one grade, instead of two rehearsals per week with both third and fourth graders. Scheduling, you suck.
Finally, I have wisely or unwisely inserted myself into another classroom: the Comunicación classes for 11th grade, i.e. language and literature. This has been my big frustration recently, comparable to Catherine's kindergarteners and not for altogether different reasons. With only three 45-minute periods of Comunicación per week, there's not enough time to do everything the teacher needs to fit in. So far I have tried to lead two discussions on short readings from the textbook, and I'm totally talking over the kids' heads, but I can't figure out how to go more basic without sticking entirely to comprehension of the plot, which they are right on board with. I hate to lead them by the nose from one appropriate quote to another and thus to the point I want to make, but they don't seem to come up with it on their own, so I have no idea. Plus, besides the excerpts of classics in the book, they are supposed to be reading one book per month outside of class, which there will be NO time to discuss, so the teacher wants me to start a voluntary discussion group outside of class. Which is great, but I have to figure out how much I should try to do, analysis- and writing-wise, with the whole class and how much with the outside group; they should all be learning how to write papers, but... Such are the difficulties. And it's not really my class anyway, so even if I knew what kind of goals to aim for with this group of students, I might not be able to really work toward them in the way I'd like.
And with all this, plus cooking twice a week with Catherine from our Peruvian cookbook, in a way I'm still bored. It's funny. At Dr. Tony's, I knew I was in a non-academic setting where my job was to worry about kids brushing their teeth and fighting over toys and peeing on the floor, and that was just that, and I got to know the kids and came to love them. But here, it's school, and yet I've been frustrated so far in trying to do some of the great things that I love about school. It's mainly because I don't know what I'm doing, either as a teacher or in terms of organizing new groups and activities; it takes a while to soak up all the information of a new setting enough simply to judge what needs to be done, not to mention figuring out how to do it. I've never been the one organizing people and making things happen, so this is my crash course. But it's a good course to have, crash or not. I think if I can just get a couple of long-term goals in my head by talking to the teachers and figuring out what goals they have in mind for their classes for the year, I'll have more of a direction to go in. The trouble is that everything seems very spontaneous, one lesson on this, one lesson on that, with no established yearlong curriculum, at least not that I've seen. I think the curriculum is in the teachers' heads. Anyway, such are the issues of the day. Catherine and I are planning to visit Ica for Semana Santa and need to figure out how to reserve hostels and bus tickets too. But at least we have learned to cook with aji and cilantro, i.e. pure deliciousness. Scones are coming up soon.
When I was considering coming here and heard "school in a shanty town in Peru," I was thinking of a few rooms, a couple teachers, and a chalkboard; thankfully Fe y Alegría is much more developed than that, but in a way it makes it more difficult that the school is fully functional without any help from us at all. In a place where everybody more or less has their schedule and their established ways of doing things, we have to figure out the most beneficial way to spend our time and then create a place for ourselves based on that. Catherine spent the first week as an aide in the kindergarten through second grade and sixth grade classrooms to get to know her future students. Then, starting last Friday, she began to teach them English. She says the sixth grade is going well, but the kindergarteners are basically a zoo, which is frustrating for someone trained as a secondary school teacher. The other big issue is materials: there aren't any, at least not being handed to her. Whatever she wants, worksheets, posters, textbooks, she has to either create or go ask somebody to help get it for her. The same goes for me--it's just that I haven't felt the lack of materials because I haven't really started creating lessons of my own yet.
During the first week I spent most of my time in the 8th through 11th grade English classrooms. The English teacher, Soledad, is a very nice, very graceful woman who speaks English well but knows she has an accent, so she asks me to help the kids pronounce the words they study. I've even noticed that she has corrected a few things about her own pronunciation based on what I've been teaching the kids, which is really professional of her. Not to mention the fact that she has basically accepted me into her class as an auxiliary teacher and been totally flexible about when I'm there and when I'm not. Flexibility, I'm learning, is one thing that this school and the teachers have in spades. Structure... not quite so much.
The first few weeks of English have been review for the students: introducing themselves, spelling (I made the more energetic groups sing the alphabet song), and vocabulary like fruits, vegetables, colors, and parts of the body. They only have two 45-minute periods of English per week. There are some hilarious things that get said in a language classroom, from the students who are "fixteen" years old to the literal translation of the school's motto on the wall, which reads, "Honesty, Laboriousness, Veracity," to the fact that not one group of students remembered on the first day that the letter Y is Y and not U. One class after another would get to "I'm sorry" on the chart of Magic Words and spell, S! O! R! R! U! (Monty Python fans--"Y, sir!"--"Y!" U is right out.) But helping with pronunciation is only so exciting, and I was getting bored, until just yesterday I started taking small groups of the more advanced students to the library for a little extra enhancement of what they're reviewing in class. It's going great so far. For tercero (9th grade), we took the colors they'd reviewed and started saying sentences like "I have a white shirt." For cuarto (10th grade), we expanded their review list of fruits and vegetables to include other foods and started to say, "I like to eat (whatever) for breakfast." It feels great to take the kids who are ready to go on and give them more to do. If nothing else, I feel that is a real gift I can make to the school this year. Of course, they are going to demand actual lesson planning, but I have a trained teacher as my Siamese twin for the year, and she's already given me a crash course in that.
So English is moving along for both of us. Our other projects are still in the works. For the after-school English club, we have to coordinate with the vice-principal for secundaria about the timing, plus decide whether we want one group or more, on what level, etc. I need to get Catherine and Soledad in the same place at the same time to discuss that... hopefully today... The hard thing is organizing anything, because it's all so unofficial that I'm never sure when something is actually happening or not. For my choir, the one that exists in my head at least, all I've managed to accomplish so far is to email my middle school choir director for advice on working with kids, and find out that all I'm getting is one rehearsal per week (on Fridays from 4:30 to 6! Gross!) with one grade, instead of two rehearsals per week with both third and fourth graders. Scheduling, you suck.
Finally, I have wisely or unwisely inserted myself into another classroom: the Comunicación classes for 11th grade, i.e. language and literature. This has been my big frustration recently, comparable to Catherine's kindergarteners and not for altogether different reasons. With only three 45-minute periods of Comunicación per week, there's not enough time to do everything the teacher needs to fit in. So far I have tried to lead two discussions on short readings from the textbook, and I'm totally talking over the kids' heads, but I can't figure out how to go more basic without sticking entirely to comprehension of the plot, which they are right on board with. I hate to lead them by the nose from one appropriate quote to another and thus to the point I want to make, but they don't seem to come up with it on their own, so I have no idea. Plus, besides the excerpts of classics in the book, they are supposed to be reading one book per month outside of class, which there will be NO time to discuss, so the teacher wants me to start a voluntary discussion group outside of class. Which is great, but I have to figure out how much I should try to do, analysis- and writing-wise, with the whole class and how much with the outside group; they should all be learning how to write papers, but... Such are the difficulties. And it's not really my class anyway, so even if I knew what kind of goals to aim for with this group of students, I might not be able to really work toward them in the way I'd like.
And with all this, plus cooking twice a week with Catherine from our Peruvian cookbook, in a way I'm still bored. It's funny. At Dr. Tony's, I knew I was in a non-academic setting where my job was to worry about kids brushing their teeth and fighting over toys and peeing on the floor, and that was just that, and I got to know the kids and came to love them. But here, it's school, and yet I've been frustrated so far in trying to do some of the great things that I love about school. It's mainly because I don't know what I'm doing, either as a teacher or in terms of organizing new groups and activities; it takes a while to soak up all the information of a new setting enough simply to judge what needs to be done, not to mention figuring out how to do it. I've never been the one organizing people and making things happen, so this is my crash course. But it's a good course to have, crash or not. I think if I can just get a couple of long-term goals in my head by talking to the teachers and figuring out what goals they have in mind for their classes for the year, I'll have more of a direction to go in. The trouble is that everything seems very spontaneous, one lesson on this, one lesson on that, with no established yearlong curriculum, at least not that I've seen. I think the curriculum is in the teachers' heads. Anyway, such are the issues of the day. Catherine and I are planning to visit Ica for Semana Santa and need to figure out how to reserve hostels and bus tickets too. But at least we have learned to cook with aji and cilantro, i.e. pure deliciousness. Scones are coming up soon.
3 comments:
Hi Kathleen,
Your blog is looks so great and everyone here at the National Office enjoys reading up on your experiences. I am working on the upcoming newsletter of "Human. Kind." for NDMV and I would like to know if you had any particular stories from your blog that you would like to contribute or if you would like to write up your own summary of your experiences. If you have any photos that you would like to include please email or post them if you can. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please let me know via email: vtsang@ndmva.org.
I hope all is well and have a great day!
Veronica Y. Tsang
NDMVA Communications and Development VISTA
mmm Aji and cilantro...delicious.
There is aji in my refrigerator right now, believe it or not. :)
Anywho, you have some interesting situations going on at the school it seems. Well, its a good way to learn patience, I suppose. I'll be praying that all goes well and that the kids follow you both better.
Te deseo todo lo mejor
ANIMOS!!!
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